"...you turn if you want to..."

I should start off this review of The Iron Lady by stating that I'm not exactly what you would call a fan of Margaret Thatcher; I was reasonably sure that, before I went to see it, I would come out of the cinema ranting about it. In the end, I came out thinking it was an uncomfortable film, that was deeply flawed...

The Iron Lady has one of those trailers that, essentially, cons you; it makes you think you'll get one sort of a movie, and ends up delivering a completely different one. Which, if the movie it delivered was a better one that the one you imagined would be a very good thing. However, this is not the case.

The trailers, and indeed all the clips I've seen of it, emphasize the years when Thatcher was at the very height of her powers. When she was in charge, and everyone was terrified of her. Even many within her own party. But those moments are really only half the movie, as the framework in which these extracts of her life are placed are being recalled as memories by the aged, dementia ridden, Thatcher of the present.

We start off with Thatcher, having somehow evaded her protection team (which all ex-Prime Ministers have), slipping to the shops to buy a paper and a pint of milk, expressing shock at how much it is; grocer's daughter see, and a contrast with a later scene in the film where she rants at members of her cabinet who are out of touch and quotes the price of a pack of half a dozen different types of butter. This is a Thatcher who is in the advancing stages of dementia, who forgets that her husband, Dennis, is dead and has imaginary conversations with him about all sorts of things, including the old days. This provides the framework for the film as she recalls how she started in politics, her rise to become first Leader of her party, then of the country.

Frustratingly, too many moments are briefly glossed over, and the impression is one of just glossing over the surface of each event; there's never any real insight in to how her mind worked. Every time you hope for a little depth, we're pulled back to the modern day, and the "framework". And this is really the biggest problem with the movie, in that it's really rather less a movie about Thatcher's life in politics than that of a person who can't let got of her dead husband; this is the emotional centre of the movie, and really, it doesn't work. There were too many moments during these sequences when I was squirming, and feeling really uncomfortable. This isn't to say such a story shouldn't be told, just that it should not have been used as the framing story for a movie about Thatcher.

I think a better framing device for the movie would have been to have used the events of November 1990, when she was ousted as a result of a leadership challenge. Have that playing out with her remembering her rise, and her glory days, as she comes to the decision that she can't contest the second round of the ballot. That would have made for a much more powerful film, in my opinion.

Some have cited historical inaccuracies in the film, but I'm not sure these really matter too much; the framework here makes it clear that the events were are seeing are as Thatcher remembers them. This is a different thing to how something might actually have been (I'm remembered here about the comment's Bill Pullman's character makes in Lost Highway about how he dislikes video cameras...). Memories are not perfect. Mind you, the "rose petal" sequence had me rolling my eyes...

The actual performances in the film are pretty good. Streep's Thatch is played really well, and you do feel a sense of sympathy for her in the framework scenes. Many of the historical figures barely get a shoo-in. Anthony Head and Richard E Grant do little more than cameos as Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine respectively; I would have loved to have seen many more scenes with both in. And the chap playing John Major doesn't even get any lines, or even a credit... (well; at least I thought it was John Major, could really have been a random grey cabinet minister in glasses, I guess...!)

I think this was one of those films that I'm glad I saw, but I don't think I actually got anything out of it. A biopic should give you an insight in to that person, what makes them tick, what motivates them; but here I don't think we got anything more than what we already know, from the public image, of Thatcher. I don't feel at all enlightened, nor do I get any sense of how she conducted herself as PM. It really was a misfire on pretty much all sides, bar the actual performances. I would probably have preferred an approach similar to that taken by The Queen; where rather than a whole life biopic, we see the events around a single, specific event, to really get under her skin to see how she worked.

Really, this was a wasted opportunity.